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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25329589">5 Times Gregor Flew Without a Flier and 1 Time He Didn't</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Streak_104/pseuds/Streak_104'>Streak_104</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Underland Chronicles - Suzanne Collins</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>5+1 Things, Canonical Character Death, Gen, The Underland Chronicles - Freeform, tuc</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-07-17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-08-16</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 04:33:33</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,542</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25329589</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Streak_104/pseuds/Streak_104</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Fly you high, Ripred had said the last time they’d seen each other. But Gregor would never fly again.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Ares &amp; Gregor Campbell, Grace Campbell &amp; Gregor Campbell, Gregor Campbell &amp; Lizzie Campbell, Gregor Campbell &amp; Lizzie Campbell &amp; Margaret "Boots" Campbell, Gregor Campbell &amp; Margaret "Boots" Campbell, Gregor Campbell/Luxa</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>18</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. The Plane</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>(1)</p><p><em>Fly you high</em>, Ripred had said the last time they’d seen each other. But Gregor would never fly again.</p><p>They take a plane to Virginia. American Airlines, Basic Economy. One small carry-on each, his grandmother left behind in New York City. After she passed away, neither Gregor’s mother nor his father had had the heart for a road trip. And Basic Economy is cheap.</p><p>Boots nestles close to him as they passed through the security lines. “Gre-gor,” she sobs, and clings to his leg. Now that she can say his name, she does so every chance she gets. Mr. Campbell offers a sympathetic smile over the backpack his arms are trembling to clutch. Gregor knows he’d take her if he could.</p><p>They’re a sorry sight, the lot of them, as they stumble forward, tense and bleary-eyed from lack of sleep. Gregor knows he’s not the only one who’s waken up in the middle of the night from dreams he’d prefer not to remember, the blinking neon glow of the alarm clock in the dark the only reminder that he’s at home, in his apartment, instead of somewhere in Regalia, on the battlefield, locked in the dungeons by Solovet, hiding from rats with Nerissa, flying high with -</p><p>Gregor ducks instinctively as Boots’ little black bat swings by his ear, clutched in her chubby fist. She squeaks with excitement. It sounds like the fliers’ language. That’s probably not a coincidence; Boots’d tried to speak crawler with the woman checking their luggage before Grace had quieted her with a nervous glance towards the employee. Gregor thinks she needn’t have bothered. The airport employees have probably seen everything by now. This is JFK, after all.</p><p>Gregor numbly unlaces his shoes and pats himself and Boots down for anything metal. They walk through the scanners, Gregor clutching Boots’ little hand. The small black bat between them.</p><p>Lizzie gets pulled aside for a routine pat-down and starts to hyperventilate. Arms out to her sides, Gregor can see her throat working and nostrils flaring. He leans across the barrier. “It’s okay, Liz,” he whispers. “Think about the Code. Think about him.” Lizzie’ll know what he means.</p><p>Slowly, her breathing quiets. She passes through to the rest of them, and Grace locks her arms around her shoulders. Her knuckles are very pale against the brown backs of her hands.</p><p>“Come on,” Gregor’s dad says. “We don’t want to miss our flight.”</p><p>It’s practically a joke, or at least what passes for one now in the Campbell family. Their plane doesn’t leave for another hour and a half.</p><p>They pass the time in the waiting area. Gregor entertains Boots to let his mom and dad sleep. She’s finally learning to count. “One, two, three,” she says, only three comes out sounding more like free.</p><p>“What comes after three?” Gregor says. Next to him, Lizzie has one knee up, her arms hugging it to her chest. He doesn’t have the heart to tell her not to put her shoes on the chair.</p><p>Boots thinks a moment. “Four, five, six!” Gregor gives her a high five and doesn’t say anything about courage.</p><p>When it’s time to leave, the Campbells are in the second-to-last group called to board. The backpack slung over Gregor’s shoulders isn’t Boots’ little pink one. He isn’t sure what happened to that one, if he even brought it back or if it’s back in the Underland. Maybe they kept it for their museum. He’d like to think that. But more likely it was shoved into a closet as soon as they got home, better off forgotten. Mrs. Cormaci had given him this one, a parting present while she told him firm words about eating enough and looking after his sisters, and himself to boot, so he wouldn’t see the water glistening on her lower eyelashes. It was uncanny, how she always knew what he needed.</p><p>Well, she won’t be there now, Gregor thinks as he buckles himself and then Boots into their seats. The family hadn’t been able to get seats all next to each other, but Lizzie is with their father further up and Grace took a middle seat towards the back. Boots, when asked if she wanted to sit with their mother or father back when they were making the bookings, had screwed up her face before saying “Gre-gor!” in such a pronounced tone of voice it was impossible to say no. Boots is here with him, but Mrs. Cormaci is already far away, back in their apartment building. Probably he’ll never see her again. Just like Luxa. Just like -</p><p>“This is your captain speaking.”</p><p>
  <em>Ares.</em>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Chapter 2</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>(2)</p><p>Boots loses Crawler, then the scraps of Gnawer and Spinner and anything else she picked up in the Underland, and then she loses English too. Gregor goes from hearing her chatter in his ear every morning before school and all evening during homework to a sickening sort of silence.</p><p>Like a plague, it infects the house when Boots stops talking. Lizzie goes quiet. Considering she was already quiet, Gregor didn’t think there could possibly be much of a difference, but before, Lizzie’s soft voice had filled the cracks between Boots’ babbling, muttering over a puzzle on her knees at the kitchen table or talking herself through the motions of getting ready for school in the morning. Lizzie was forgetting there, for a while; she’d leave home without her backpack, or forget to brush her hair and come home crying because the other students had teased her for it. Grace had to make her a diagram, with pictures sourced from the Internet: happy children getting out of bed in the morning, brushing their teeth, eating breakfast. Next to each step, Grace put a box for Lizzie to check off. There were oodles of copies, one for each day of the week, and every Sunday Grace printed out a new batch. She prints them still.</p><p>So that was Lizzie taken care of, for now at least. Boots, Gregor is finding out, is another matter altogether.</p><p>It’s Boots’ firmly closed pout, mouth set tight when Lizzie tries to talk to her or their dad dandles her on his lap in an effort to make her laugh, that Gregor’s thinking of instead of Mrs. Tipton’s lecture on <em>To Kill a Mockingbird</em>, when a ball of wadded-up paper slaps him moistly on the neck and sticks there.</p><p>Immediately, Gregor cringes, his shoulders almost at his ears as he slaps the spitball away. It’s nothing in comparison to being sliced by a sword, but the ooze of the paper on the back of his neck feels way too close to blood for comfort. In an instant, he’s back there: <em>Gnawers attacking, sharp claws grabbing for him, even the plants, veining around his ankles like they mean to put down roots. Hamnet dead, Twitchtip dead. Pandora. Ar—</em></p><p>“Hey,” hisses the kid who threw the spitball. Immature jerk. “Aren’t you the kid with the sister who doesn’t talk?”</p><p>Gregor fights back the red haze he feels forming over his vision at the words. Third period isn’t the time to go berserker on some idiot who could never understand, but that doesn’t mean his rager instincts go down easy. His hands open and clench in the baggy denim of his jeans. His left knee pokes through a hole there.</p><p>“Gregor.”</p><p>He looks up, guilty. The haze is starting to fade. “Yes, Mrs. Tipton?”</p><p>She narrows usually-kind eyes at him. “Have you been paying attention?”</p><p>What a loaded question. “Er… yes?”</p><p>Mrs. Tipton taps her pointer against a question she must have written in chalk on the blackboard. “Then you should have no trouble telling me what the climax of <em>To Kill a Mockingbird</em> is.”</p><p>“I’ll bet your sister wouldn’t have any trouble telling her anything,” Gregor hears the boy whisper behind him. “Oh, that’s right. She can’t talk.”</p><p>Gregor doesn’t remember throwing his chair at the boy. He doesn’t remember three broken fingers, or Mrs. Tipton calling security to pry them apart. He knows, instinctively and from conversations at home, that now that he’s in seventh grade, he’s at an age where other students will test their limits. Try each other’s patience. Middle school is a hard time for everyone.</p><p>But rager instincts, it turns out, don’t give a fuck about hormones.</p><p>It’s decided at home, in whispered conversations between his parents that Gregor can half-hear through the vents in their new home. It’s tiny, his bedroom sandwiched between his parents’ and the slightly larger room Boots and Lizzie share. The principal explains it all to Grace and his dad. A child psychologist is the best course of action, with one kid closed off and the other with his emotions laid bare, too much out in the open. She recommends one, very kindly, who lives in Washington. The school will foot the bill.</p><p>It’s with her nose smushed against the plane window, Gregor in between her and their dad in the aisle, that Boots says her first word in a very long time. “Pincess,” she whispers, and Gregor looks over her head and out at the trees spread out like Q-tips below them. She sounds terribly sad in the way no four-year-old ever should. “Pincess.”</p><p>But Nike never appears.</p>
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